SubscribeMoving to ISC
Wednesday, 30 July 2008
I hereby announce that all of the code I produce from now on will use the ISC license. Previously I've used the MIT license and the GNU GPL, or LGPL where applicable.
The reason for changing this is two-fold. First, I like to be able to reuse much of what I do in proprietary settings. Yes, I'm one of those people who look upon the world with "grey" eyes rather than black & white. Second, the ISC license is a lot more clear on the wording but is still GPL compatible.
Link Collection w31 2008
Wednesday, 30 July 2008
George Dyson, son of legendary Freeman Dyson, talks about the first computer, the first software bugs (both physical and logical) and the initial struggles of hackers. Fun history lesson for computer engineers and programmers alike. (Now, go crawl the web for "Dyson Sphere" and "Star Trek"! :-)
Is Ubuntu 8.04 really that buggy as everyone suggest? My guess is that we've reached a breaking point where beginner users (< 1 year) are starting to outnumber the older "hard core" users. Or have the top 20% moved on to other distros? Even XKCD has picked up on it...
Michael Meeks of Novell was interviewed recently by the Austrian paper derStandard.at, and one of the things he mentioned was the OpenOffice fork they maintain, very interesting new features, not (yet) included in OpenOffice.org, e.g. .docx and VBA support!
A couple of days ago I managed to convince a friend of mine to try running bleeding edge GNU Emacs from CVS. He almost gave up, kicking and screaming, due to his Bitstream Vera fonts becoming totally screwed up compared to Alexandre Vassalottis snapshot build from January. It turned out to be caused by the Emacs font back-end defaulting to the old X font renderer rather than the new XFT one.
Here is my ~/.Xresources file that seems to fix the problem. Run xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources to merge in the new settings without logging out/in again:
The Canonical SourceForge equivalent, Launchpad, is slowly turning into something really cool. Take the tour if you are curious and want to know more.
I cannot believe I haven't heard of pastebin before. Thanks Rooth!
My dear wife is a GNU Nano user. Here are a couple of tips for her, and other die-hard Nano users.
Are you an electronics or computer engineer? Then you've probably had trouble explaining boolean logic to people. This dude explains it all using dominoes.
Finishing off with this, unbeatable, hardware hacker. He's transformed his EeePC into a veritable monster! See his guide to the most basic changes necessary...
HowTo build GNU Emacs from CVS
Monday, 28 July 2008Why would you want to do this? Well, considering all the neat new things that have been added lately it should be tempting for any old Emacs fan.
The Emacs Wiki has all the info you need, but here is a quick run-down of the bare necessities:
- Check out your working copy of the source: cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/cvsroot/emacs co emacs
- cd emacs/
- ./configure
- make bootstrap
- Done!
Start with ./src/emacs or symlink the binary to your ~/bin/ directory. I.e., you don't have to run make install to use it.
Users of emacsclient should symlink that to their ~/bin as well.
The above assumes; a) that you have the appropriate -dev packages installed in Debian/Ubuntu, and b) that your .bashrc does indeed add ~/bin to your search PATH environment variable.
More Emacs Progress!
Tuesday, 22 July 2008Wow, I'm almost starting to feel like a Windows user. The latest builds of GNU Emacs has a lot of new features:
- XFT Support (anti-aliasing)
- Better GTK integration (desktop)
- A font selector!
Here's a screen shot of my main editor window in Ubuntu 8.10.
Here is another, debugging a program.
I think it is quite impressive how far this little editor has come. OK, so it is perhaps not just an editor anymore. Some people claim it is a fully sufficient operating system and other refer to it as a kitchen sink. Nevertheless, today you do not need to know any Lisp to configure it or grab the scroll bar with the middle mouse button or any other archaic method to get around.
Still interested? Be sure to take the tour and then proceed to explore the wonderful world of Emacs.
No Wireless LED on ThinkPad T61
Saturday, 19 July 2008I've got a ThinkPad T61 with Intel iwl3945 wireless chipset that I installed fresh with Ubuntu 8.04. Everything worked flawlessly out-of-the-box, except for the useless fingerprint scanner and the wireless LED. Don't get me wrong, the wireless network worked fine, but the LED wasn't on.
At first I thought there was something wrong with the LED itself, but a couple of searches later I found that it was a known limitation of the 2.6.24 kernel included in 8.04. A driver upgrade was scheduled for 8.04.1 and after a couple of months it was shipped. Silly me thought I'd get the upgrade automatically, but it turns out that both the iwl3945 and the iwl4965, as well as a bunch of other wireless drivers, are tucked away in linux-backports-modules-hardy, which will not be installed by default.
So, if you have some wireless issues in Ubuntu 8.04, try installing this (meta) package (that depends on a suitable version specific kernel) and see if it helps.
Suddenly Compiz is not Working Anymore...
Thursday, 17 July 2008So weird. I usually rearrange my desktop every two weeks, often when I am bored. Sometimes I want a quick lean, smallish desktop and other times I want the whole shebang, all possible animations, SVG icons, mouse gestures — you name it and I will already have tons of it!
Today I wanted to enable Compiz again and it just wouldn't start. After a couple of tries that turned out to be dead ends I finally got this:
/usr/bin/compiz.real (core) - Error: Could not acquire compositing manager selection on screen 0 display ":0.0"
Some more digging around Google gave me the answer: Metacity and Compiz fight to be "compositing manager" ...
...as soon as I disabled /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager I could enable Compiz again!
Missing Sound in Firefox?
Monday, 14 July 2008In Ubuntu 8.04 I recently discovered that you need to install the libflashsupport package if you get no sound in Firefox while running flash application/video. Oddly enough this is not a "required" or "supported" package in Ubuntu proper.
Regexp replace in many files
Sunday, 13 July 2008I just have to blog about this exceptional tool I just found. It is called regexxer and is a tool in the true UNIX spirit — it does one job only, and does it well.
Minix editline v0.2.1
Monday, 09 June 2008The v0.2.0 version included some Debian patches, tcgetattr() and a batch mode (when reading from file) line reader. This release fixes a bug in the Debian patch that caused the batch mode version of readline() to actually truncate lines longer than 64 chars.
Get it from the usual FTP location:
Minix editline v0.1.4
Monday, 09 June 2008Another day another release, I guess. :-)
Lots of small fixes -- it can now be cross-built for Arm (Xscale) without any serious warnings. Get it from the usual FTP location: